The case of the World Commission on Dams is a good example of how this tendency to centralize water resource management can be mitigated, if not completely eliminated.

The political reality of the world is that government represents more than just laws and policies, just as management and governance has to be about more than just enacting laws and edicts, but should reflect the values of the community and the interests of the communities that will be summarily affected by those policies. In the case of water resource management, this means that it must be a prerequisite to involve a wider variety of community stakeholders as part of the decision-making process in order to make more "equitable and sustainable use of rivers. But in most countries, the cards are stacked heavily against an inclusive and more balanced process. Patterns of governance for the most part still reflect the utilitarian mind-set of the twentieth century, which focused on the engineering challenges of bringing rivers under control for society's economic advancement" (Postel and Richter 168). Accordingly, the issue that governments traditionally consider with regard to water resource management has been how to accomplish specific tasks that will, presumably, benefit the political or economic landscape. Little thought has been traditionally given to how such decisions would impact the people who actually have to live with those decisions: in the case of dam construction, those individuals whose lives and livelihoods might be displaced permanently by the presence of an enormous lake where there once was a river.

The World Commission on Dams, sponsored by the World Bank, found that this traditional model is rife with failings and invariably fails to take into account local and regional social and environmental impacts, focusing instead on technical or political benefits instead. After two years of intense study, the WCD found that diversifying stakeholder involvement throughout the communities that would be affected by dam-related decisions needed to be a project requirement. Referencing the WCD Knowledge Base of Dams, the Commission recognized a failure to include the interests of affected people in the planning process or, when involved, the political power and right to participate in the process and ensure that their voices were considered. The WCD found that "in terms of the social impacts of dams, [...] negative effects were neither adequately assessed nor accounted for [and that the] range of these impacts is substantial, including on the lives, livelihoods, and health of the affected communities dependent on the riverine environment" ("Dams and Development" 16-19).

To break from this tradition of neglect in dam and water resource management, the WCD attempted to undermine the traditional model and involve a wide range of stakeholders in an effort to involve the people who would ultimately be affected. In particular, the WCD stood out in the way in which it selected participants on the commission. Rather than following the "eminent persons model" or distinguished politicians, the WCD sought out and comprised itself of "active practitioners whose personal legitimacy derived from their prominence in international networks of stakeholders" (Dubash et al. 2). The intent, which was somewhat successful, was to involve individuals that while outspoken on the issue of dam construction and management, might not otherwise have a voice in the political process of making decisions about the future of dams on rivers throughout the world. Their efforts were successful and helped to create a more active process of participants who might engage the issues in ways dramatically different than politicians otherwise would.

Of course, the WCD still selected from amongst the most privileged and knowledgeable on the subject: a requirement for actually getting things done, but not necessarily conducive to actually reaching the people who would be affected by any decision that was made. Nonetheless, the World Bank encourages this kind of local participation, even amongst the "poor, indigenous people, and disadvantaged groups -- in the water-related operations it supports" (Bauer, "Water Resources Management" 16). Throughout the world, this has been an increasing trend as local and global grassroots efforts have emerged to help the people who are directly affected by these water management issues voice their concerns and issues in a forum that could actually affect the decision making process. Such initiatives have emerged in Chile's river basin management, and in World Bank projects throughout the world (Briscoe, Salas, and Pena 10; Postel and Richter 169).

The guiding principle, and a noble one in theory if not always in execution, behind these movements is the idea that water resource management should happen as close to the actual people who will be affected by the decisions as possible (Bauer, "Water Resources Management" 15). Top-down hierarchical decision making will only marginalize and create continuing problems associated with dams and water management that could be avoided or at least alleviated in those cases where it would have been otherwise possible to connect local people with the resources they could have used to manage the issue themselves.

Other Documents Pertaining To This Topic

Sustainability: What is required to stop global warming and other negative consequences of industrialization?
The need for businesses and governments to be sustainable enterprises is one of the most talked-about subjects in the media today. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): "Sustainability is based on a simple principle: Everything that we need for our survival and well-being depends, either directly or indirectly, on our natural environment. Sustainability creates and maintains

Joseph Tainter, Sustainability
What does moving toward sustainability really entail? Joseph Tainter's article on "Social Complexity and Sustainability" makes a crucial distinction at the outset, differentiating sustainability from resiliency. Sustainability entails a society's ability to continue along in current patterns or modes of existence, whereas resiliency is a society's ability to adjust and reorient itself during conditions of change. It is possible that unsustainable policies or activities may have put is

S. Green Building Council (USGBC) in 2000 and has since led to over 9 billion square feet of facility space being in compliance. In addition, LEED has taken on the most challenging areas of quantifying through cost analysis the contributions of these initiative to the bottom line of companies
(Haxton, Beckstead, 2008). The results have shown a 35% reduction in operating costs while reducing energy costs while also reducing emissions and

Sustainability Science
Phase 4 Discussion Board
The article that I will be reviewing is "Key competencies in sustainability: a reference framework for academic program development." This article was published in the journal Sustainability Science and directly covers the development of the academic discipline. The authors note that as the discipline matures into a full-fledged academic discipline, there is a need to understand the nature of sustainability science and what the key competencies

Water in Sub-Saharan Africa is of special interest because of my background but water is a fascinating issue in general, one that I think will play an increasingly large role in the 21st century, as the effects of population growth and climate change bring about significant changes to our water usage and availability. A lack of water in particular has a substantial destabilizing effect.
Water as a social issue combines a

Sustainability in Business
Sustainability PowerPoint® Presentation and Paper
Sustainability refers to the capacity of a business to have no significant negative impact on the local or global community, environment, society or the economy. These businesses strive to meet the triple bottom line (TBL) which consists of people, planet and profit. This means that the businesses demonstrate their commitment to CSR through catering for people, the planet and profit. For people, it means

Water Global Human Needs
System Thinking and Transformative Social Systems in Sustainability
It is a fact that above 70% of the surface of the Earth is water. However, the real issue despite the abundance of water is the availability of fresh water (Amanda, 2013). Of the total waters on Earth, 97.5% of this is salty water; this leaves only a 2.5% as fresh water. To add on this deafening fact, of all